The supply chain industry encompasses multiple lines of business ranging from transportation, customs, warehousing, insurance, manufacturing, procurement and many more. Supply chains are the nervous systems that manage the pipeline of raw materials that manufacturers need to produce goods, drive the logistics of redistributing and delivering products, and ultimately empower consumers’ ability to obtain goods and services. These systems are responsible for managing the complex supply, capacity, and demand issues that vary by the day, the hour, and even the minute.
Microsoft sees advances in supply chain technologies as being key functional horizontal components enabling success in many industries including retail, manufacturing, energy, and agriculture.
Most supply chain companies are making progress deploying operational edge technology, data collection systems, and backend analytical tools to improve distribution and delivery processes. The next generation of supply chain technology will be dependent on an end-to-end supply chain collaboration ecosystem comprised of sharing, telemetry, cargo tracking and more.
To realize the above industry vision, Microsoft is leveraging research to build an ecosystem for supply chain & logistics as a vertical. Our research for the supply industry will facilitate cost reductions, drive a gain in service quality, and enable important sustainability measures.
We are pursuing research that is necessary to overcome some fundamental challenges and realize the long-term industry vision. These challenges include: modeling and optimizing value chain to increase efficiency and resiliency, increasing visibility & traceability in supply chain for better decision making, sustainability reasoning across Multiple Agent Systems, automation platforms for drones and other vehicles such as ground vehicles, trucks, etc., automation in warehouses, and the trucking problem.